The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [86]
Finally, there’s air freight: this is the royal treatment in terms of consumer goods and is reserved for high-value and/or time-sensitive cargo, like designer clothes and some electronics. Although it doesn’t carry much of the total weight, 35 percent of the value of goods traded internationally travels by air, according to Giovanni Bisignani, the CEO of the International Air Transport Association.38 And that’s not all that’s disproportionate about air freight. A study in Europe showed that while planes carried just 3 percent of all European cargo’s weight, they contributed a whopping 80 percent of the total CO2 emissions from freight.39
With the recent spikes in oil prices and looming regulations and/or taxes on CO2, some businesses and governments have already begun to address the energy use and greenhouse gas production from shipping. The U.S. EPA operates a program called SmartWay Transport, through which it works with shippers to reduce emissions. That means combining more sustainable railroad transport with trucking, for example; ensuring that trucks are loaded to full capacity and not wasting any space; improving truck aerodynamics by making sure tarps aren’t flapping around and that loads are packed low and as streamlined as possible; monitoring and maintaining the air pressure of truck tires and replacing them with wider tires; training drivers in techniques like coasting when possible or limiting idling; and mandating slower speeds.40
Some companies that specialize in freight have taken steps to green themselves. United Parcel Service, or UPS, has launched trucks with hydraulic hybrid technology that are supposed to “increase fuel efficiency by 60–70% in urban use and lowers greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, compared to UPS’s conventional diesel delivery trucks.”41 Not to be outdone, FedEx has peppered its fleet with hybrid electric vehicles that decrease particulate emissions by 96 percent and go 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than a conventional FedEx truck, reducing fuel costs by more than one-third.42 DHL has launched its own version of carbon offsets, offering customers the ability to tack on a 3 percent extra fee that DHL promises to invest in “green projects like vehicle technology, solar panels and reforestation.”43
Nice as those efforts sound, they don’t get to the crux of the problem, which is this set of massive global supply chains (as long as ten thousand miles, according to some experts44), the consumer demand for more cheap Stuff delivered faster and faster, and the economic rules governing the whole show, which make it more profitable to make Stuff on the other side of the planet than close to home.
With all of the above in mind, let’s look at the retail distribution of the same three items we zeroed in on last chapter. Although these aren’t the retailers I bought my Stuff from, for the sake of discussion let’s say the white T-shirt was sold by the low-end Swedish fashion giant H&M, that the book was bought via Amazon.com, and the computer was purchased at Wal-Mart (although it wasn’t, I promise). Studying these three megavendors will shed some light on the role of retailers in global distribution.
H&M
In addition to little white T-shirts, the Swedish clothing giant H&M sells more than 500 million items every year, from more than 1,700 stores.45 It’s the world’s third-largest clothing retailer, after Gap Inc. and Spain’s Inditex group, netting more than $440 million even in the relatively